All editions of Node.Hack EX will cost $0.99 US at release, and will be available worldwide. Of course, the original, ad-supported free version of Node.Hack will still be available on Windows Phone, but we’re pretty sure you’ll want to upgrade when you see what’s in store:

New Features for Node.Hack EX

Featuring all the great hacking action and strategy of the original Node.Hack, the EX version adds the following new features:

• New Weapon: Mortar Strike – rain down destruction with this close-support artillery weapon.
• 5 New “Melee” Maps – scramble for more cash under a swarm of enemies in these five new maps.
• Escape Bonus – get even greedier with 2x score bonuses when the exit is open; 4x for Melee maps.
• Level Select – play from any level you’ve previously reached without having to start over.

It’s new, exciting, updated hacking action, and we think it’s well worth it to upgrade! If you’ve got a Windows Phone and want to dive in and try the free version of Node.Hack, it’s available now at http://www.nodehackgame.com.

Look for Node.Hack EX for Windows Phone in February 2012, and on all other platforms in March.

Download the game from Windows Phone Marketplace in the following countries/regions:

• Australia
• Austria
• Belgium
• Canada
• Chile
• Colombia
• Czech Republic
• Denmark
• Finland
• France
• Germany
• Greece
• Hong Kong SAR
• Hungary
• India
• Ireland
• Italy
• Japan
• Mexico
• Netherlands
• New Zealand
• Norway
• Poland
• Portugal
• Russia
• Singapore
• South Africa
• Spain
• Sweden
• Switzerland
• Taiwan
• United Kingdom
• United States

Want to learn more about Node.Hack? Visit http://www.nodehackgame.com.

Notes about Your Hacker:

• Your most valuable asset is the ability to alter your path. Once you’ve set a path, you can always change it by tapping a new node, or cancel it by tapping the closest node to your character.
• You have the ability to turn around on a bridge, not just a node.
• Your character moves a little faster than the AI – you will always win in a race away from them.

Notes about the Enemy AI:

• AI enemies do not think of risk the same way the player does. You will often be able to get away as they go down a dead-end. They also do not flee from collapsing nodes.
• Unlike the player, enemies cannot turn around on bridges – they must get to a node to change direction.
• Enemies give off a red ping when they move from node to node. You can use this to spot enemies coming your way.

There are more hints coming in the next two weeks, including notes on effectively using your weapons, and planning out your strategy as soon as you set down in a new map. Stay tuned!

Haven’t tried Node.Hack yet? It’s a free game for Windows Phone – get it at www.nodehackgame.com.

Strategy is sometimes defined as the art of finding fit – choosing a set of mutually-reinforcing tactics that come together to bring you to a desired future. In designing Node.Hack, I took on the challenge of envisioning an emotional strategy; I decided that my first choice would be emotional, and that the rest of the game would follow from there.

So – you’ve got a hacking game. How would you want your player to feel? I picked three primary emotional themes and led with them: paranoia, anxiety, and greed. If you think of the player’s hacking enterprise as just one in a long career of digital misdeeds – a real pro hacker – these emotions don’t seem so far off. I placed myself halfway through the game’s progression: I’ve got plenty of money, but the stakes are higher and I’ve just barely escaped this last system. What would the ultimate mental mixture play to out to in words? How would the player’s mind explain their own choice if it were talking to itself?

I know they’re coming to get me, but this is more money than I’ve ever seen in my life. I have to take this chance.

You could say that every game has some elements of this, and you’d be right. So does one of my favorite movies: Heat (NSFW). But it’s about what the game doesn’t do that represents a faithful dedication to the strategy:

• Slow, not fast tempo (in action, and in music)
• Single-hit kills, no replenishing life meter
• Moments of waiting suspense (movement vs. money)
• Allow “inevitability” moment where the player knows they will die

Put it together and you have a game that’s a little more like chess than a traditional video game. Players that tested the early version felt addicted to the challenge, but not overly frustrated. When they died, they felt it was something they had influence over, rather than a random bullet from out of nowhere.

To me, that’s success in a video game; reward often, and punish only with a lesson in how to do better. True randomness, while a seductive notion for video games, is something better saved for real life - but that’s a discussion for another post, when we get into the dynamic map generation at the heart of Node.Hack. For now, stay sharp and watch out for those AI.

Want to try Node.Hack? Get it free for Windows Phone at http://www.nodehackgame.com.

Please give Node.Hack a try; download the free game onto your Windows Phone today. Or, if you’d like to learn a little more, watch this trailer:

Let me know what you think in the comments, Facebook or Twitter, and please spread the word!

Does the node-and-bridge architecture remind you of something? Do the representations of the player, the enemies, the loot, do they seem like somewhere you’ve been before?

They do to me – and it’s no accident. I am an unapologetic ASCII-hound, and the simplicity of the single code-page world was an exercise in constraint-fueled design whose challenge has yet gone unmatched.

Tim Sweeney’s ZZT – the grandfather of this kind of game – made it feel like all things were possible. And, during my SysOp days on my bulletin board, I fell in love with a particular doorgame called NetRunner (shown above): a 1993 ASCII-based hacking game that drew inspiration from the card game of the same name, and the stylized anthropomorphism of “node” hacking made popular in the Shadowrun series of RPGs and the visceral writings of William Gibson.

As a developer, I’ve had some direct forays into that world of ASCII graphics with prototype projects like The Agency: Razor One, but today’s modern platforms – phones, tablets, consoles – just don’t play that game anymore. And why should they? Games made of text characters? They fail to impress, they feel like playing on punchcards.

Seriously - Would You Play Something Like This?

But what if a stylized version of that world formed the backdrop, crafted some of the rules, and then let you break them? Could you imagine, being held down to an ASCII world but then suddenly breaking free? Explosions, splashes of binary on skewing vectors, breaking the imagined plane of the two-by-two universe?

I did – and I called it Node.Hack.

Tomorrow, it will be released to the world, and I hope that you’ll enjoy it. There’s a lot of my childhood in its shapes and contours, from the sounds to the interface all the way to the strange notion that somehow, tapping that node with your finger, rather than typing it into a computer console, still feels right – even though we aren’t sure why.

Welcome to the future. Again.

Learn more about Node.Hack at http://www.nodehackgame.com.

This isn’t the first time Node.Hack has been through the pipeline – I made sure to give it a good couple of test runs; I found the Marketplace process efficient and instructive. Now comes the final wait: officially, Node.Hack is on v1.4 – that’s the version that entered certification tonight.

If I’ve done my job, that’ll be the version that you get to play. When? Next Tuesday, November 15th. We’re even having a release party.

We’ve already got our first press preview for the game out in the wild - if you haven’t seen it, be sure to check it out, including the trailer video.

Over the next month as the game rolls out, stay tuned to this blog and to http://www.nodehackgame.com for updates; I’ll be posting stories about the game’s development including details about the dynamic map generator, and tips and tricks for navigating Node.Hack’s treacherous digital world.

All I know is that for the last decade, I’ve been working instinctively, following rules I never really codified. Last night, I started to change that, by planning out how to take my Windows Phone game prototype for Node.Hack all the way to a finished product.

Where is it now? Node.Hack is in a prototype phase, with one finished level and a number of systems up and running. What will it take to convert this game to a finished, ad-supported game that people will want to play and keep playing?

Turns out it’s looking like 55 nights and weekend days to get this thing done. Yikes. But at least I have a number. And a prioritized list of tasks. And a very clear picture of the constraints and limits that will keep this project from blowing up like a balloon. It’s incredibly liberating to have it all down. So how can you plan a game and get all the way to a schedule?

Think of your game production process as a set of instruments that need to be calibrated together. You’re in the lab and in the middle of that calibration right now – even if it’s in your own head. You have to answer the following questions, in order:

• What is your game’s mission statement?
• What are your game’s principles and constraints?
• What is your game’s flow?
• What are your game’s system priorities?
• What are your work items to finish the systems?

Once you have these five descending elements, you can derive your schedule and be pretty crisp about the game as a whole. I’ll cover the first two today, the remaining ones later this week.

Part One – Start with a Mission Statement:

Node.Hack is a free action-strategy game for Windows Phone where players have fun, challenge themselves, and see ads.

You’ve got to have a statement. Notice mine – and notice what’s missing. No art style, no clever creative stuff, no set dressing. Platform, genre, monetization, and a couple other small points.

• “Have fun” had better be in there. Call it superstition. But if you’re making games and you don’t put this in there, be nervous.
• “Challenge themselves” is my shorthand for reminding myself not to add multiplayer. Scope tightly, my friends.

For those concerned about the sell-out factor in having me put my monetization strategy (see ads) right front and center, remember that your selling strategy defines an awful lot of the rest of your priorities, including how big your game is, how much screen real estate you have, and more.

In fact, the monetization and the mission should work together to land your principles – the “non-negotiables” of your game design and architecture.

Part Two – Drive Your Principles and Constraints from Your Mission:

It gets interesting when you have to decide what you aren’t going to do. You could try to do everything in the entire world because that’s what “professional” games do, but I’d encourage you to – once again – scope tightly.

In this world of constant updates, you can always add features and attract more users. The big risk isn’t losing customers from not having every feature at the start. It’s not getting the game done at all, in any form, because you are trying to hit an impossibly hard target. That’s the trap you need to avoid.

Tomorrow, we’ll talk flow, system priorities, and that all-important work item list that will derive your final schedule.

I was stuck right there, at the periphery of the crowd, hesitant to jump in, when I first found karaoke.

You’ll hear the same story from people in all walks of life; I hear a proto-version of this story when I ask others if they’d like to sing karaoke*. It represents a jumping-off point from one cliff of culture into the sea of another and, in hearing others tell their tales, getting up on stage and braving your first song represents a type of light bulb moment where the singer learns something new about themselves, the audience, and the fluid state of culture in general.

For me, it took a little longer. See – my first song didn’t really work very well.

No Static at All

I’ve been a Steely Dan fan for a while – even if I do rip on them a bit. When I first found the karaoke book at a bar up north, I was possessed of a set of Steely Dan to complete my collection, including some of the more obscure tracks. One I particularly liked, entitled “FM”, was the title track to a movie of the same name. Both the song and the movie, I later found out, were ultimately forgettable.

But when I opened the karaoke book, there it was, staring me in the face. FM – Steely Dan.

All I had to do was write it on a slip of paper, hand it in, and sing just like I did in the car or in the shower. I knew the song, I knew at least some of the crowd. Failure wasn’t assured, at any rate.

But man, was it close. About all that I missed was spilling a drink on the machine. My voice came out croaky, constantly lagging in pursuit of its echo on the speakers, like a dog who discovered its tail for the first time. My rhythms were off, saved from yawing off the deep end only by punctuating guitar solos. And the sustains – they didn’t happen. Not because I failed at those, but because I didn’t try. I didn’t know I could sustain a note.

When it was over, the hostess running the show smiled and announced: “That was Charles. A nice young man.”

A nice young man.

Failure Stops Here

I don’t know precisely why that one line ripped the needle across the record for me, but I think I had a gravestone moment – I saw that line as my epitaph, the final analysis of my entire contribution to humanity – and I saw red. I didn’t get mad at the hostess, or the patrons, or the song. I didn’t blame anyone, didn’t try to excuse my actions or pretend it didn’t matter.

Instead, I just tried again. And again.

Give a Little Respect, by Erasure. Your Song, by Elton John. Rio, by Duran Duran. The Scientist, by Coldplay.

I tried every song I thought I could get away with, in every genre I knew, and I came back the next week, and the week after that. I tried new places, met new folks, introduced myself to more hosts and hostesses and learned the little secrets behind the microphone and how to get the sound you wanted.

I picked songs that fit within my range – something I had never stretched or learned how to find – and learned to stay on the tempo of the music, not the words on the screen, as video and processing delays make you sound a step behind.

Years passed, and as I found new places to try out songs, a strange thing was happening – I wasn’t failing at karaoke anymore. The epithets were replaced with applause, and I was getting requests for songs that were becoming crowd favorites.

And on one of those stages, in the middle of one of those songs, I met Alicia, and proposed to her on that same stage later the following year.

As karaoke singers, we both knew that our wedding had to rejoice in the same stagecraft and music that brought us out of our own shells; our karaoke-centric wedding in June of 2010 remains one of my happiest moments, and set the tone for a joyous celebration of our marriage, one that I believe has the right stuff to weather any storm this crazy world can sling at us.

Is there still room for failure in success? Sure, some realities crop up no matter how well it’s going: when I proposed to Alicia, I sang her a version of Jo Dee Messina’s “Heads Carolina, Tails California”, and I butchered it, badly. I can’t hit those notes, and I knew it.

But by then, it simply didn’t matter. I didn’t care. Nobody cared. That day, not a single one of us failed.

The Lesson: Constant failure, just like constant success, is a statistical improbability. If you believe in what you’re doing, and feel the rewards outweigh the risks, keep going. Keep trying. Get better. Success might be right around the corner, and you don’t want to miss meeting it.

* In talking with dozens – potentially hundreds – of possible karaoke participants, almost invariably I do not hear a straight “no”. Those on the fence tell me they would need to be really drunk to sing – I don’t know why this is such a uniform response, but I take it as a positive sign that we human beings are a braver lot than we give ourselves credit for – we’re just afraid to take the leap. Have fun, stay in school, don’t drink and drive.

All the details, downloadable slides, and a larger video are available here: Windows Phone: how to build a game